In each and every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as though he actually left Egypt. As it says: “You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of this that God took me out of Egypt.’” (Exodus 13:8)“It’s freedom, baby, yeah!”- Austin PowersWe’re deep into model seder season here at the school. All through the school, students from iCare and RJDS are singing Pesach songs, sharing teachings about freedom and slavery, and enjoying the matzah ball soup and brownies deliciously prepared by Marsha, who is really the balabusteh orrebbetzin of the school. And now that the folding chairs have been put away, the matzah crumbs swept up, and the grape-juice stained tablecloths taken off to be laundered, I’m sitting here trying to process it all. Part of trying to understand this experience is to know at a deep level that we as a people have been conducting seders for thousands of years, and what we do with our model seders and seders at home is another link in this timeless chain of tradition. The words and tunes on the lips of the students today are the same as from students from hundreds, or even thousands of years ago in Jerusalem, or Maghreb or Krakow, or one of the countless places we have lived over the centuries. And we tell the same story of our Exodus over and over again, and indeed, the haggadah states that “all who expound upon the Passover story shall be praised.”But really, what are we doing this for? What is the ultimate purpose of being a part of this chain, beyond the broad terms of continuity and tradition? There has to be something more to this than going through the choreography of the order of the seder, who gets to sing ma nishtana, how much matzah are we really required to eat, and so on.While the haggadah makes much of the centrality of Pesach, Matzah and Maror, the one song that I think begins to answer these questions, and that always makes me stop and think is Dayenu, which translates as “It Would Have Been Enough For Us!” It begins with Had He brought us out of Egypt, It Would Have Been Enough For Us and then sequentially chronicles all the good God did for us along the way, from Egypt to Israel to the building the Beit Hamikdash, the Temple in Jerusalem. And at each point, along the way, the refrain is “It Would Have Been Enough For Us!”. As if just taking us out of Egypt would have been enough. Or dividing the sea for us. Or spending 40 years in the desert. We know that’s not true. We know there is an end game in mind, which is alluded to in the last three stanzas of Dayenu – giving us the Torah, bringing us to Israel and building the Holy Temple.We were slaves. And then we were given the gift of freedom. But how to use that freedom to really live as Jews, be it in our homeland or not, with the Temple or otherwise? And how do we do it successfully?Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his 1953 essay “The Spirit of Jewish Education”, writes at length about what this gift of freedom is for, and the significance and role of Jewish education in all of this. He writes:“… I would like to suggest as a goal of Jewish education that every Jew… become aware that Judaism is an answer to the ultimate problems of human existence and not merely a way of handling observances…The Hebrew term for education means not only to train but also to dedicate, to consecrate. And to consecrate the child must be our goal… The survival of the Jewish people is our basic concern. But what kind of survival we must continually ask, and for what purpose?Our goal must be to enable the pupil to participate and share in the spiritual experience of Jewish living; to explain to him or her what it means to live a likeness of God. For what is involved in being a Jew? Duties of the heart, not only external performance; the ability to experience the suffering of others, compassion and acts of kindness; sanctification of time, not the mere observance of customs and ceremonies; the joy of discipline, not the pleasures of conceit; sacrifice, not casual celebrations, contrition, rather than national pride…Here of course, everything depends on the person who stands in front of the classroom… the modern teacher… is a link in the chain of tradition. He is the intermediary between the past and the present as well. Yet she is also the creator of the future of our people. The teacher must teach the pupils to evaluate the past in order to clarify their future.”What do you think? Is Heschel’s vision for Judaism and Jewish education too utopian, or is it achievable? Do you agree that we left Egypt to gain the freedom to discover that Judaism is in Heschel’s words “an answer to the ultimate problems of human existence and not merely a way of handling observances”?I’ll be honest – there are days where I’m driving to work, and the true power of what we are trying to do with our students and families hits me, and I find myself moved to tears. What is Pesach really, really about? God took us out of Egypt and gave us the Torah to really learn how to live powerful, holy and meaningful lives. The responsibility to give over this spiritual inheritance and way of being to our children and students is immense. We are honoured to do it, and we are humbled to partner with our families in doing this holy work. It’s all of our responsibility. No one else will do it for us.Enjoy your families, enjoy your seders. Shabbat Shalom, and chag cheirut kasher v’sameach.

This post first appeared on http://www.rjds.ca/freedom-for-what and is a re-posting.

I'm copying a blog post that I wrote this past Friday for my school, Richmond Jewish Day School. It is about our grade 6 and 7 students joining with their counterparts from Az-Zahraa Islamic Academy, and delivering over 1,000 lunches along with toiletries and blankets, all generously donated, to residents of the Downtown East Side, the poorest neighborhood in Canada. It is worth the read, and I encourage you to also click on the following link to see how our program made the news.

The blog post begins like this:

The well known phrase and song “Mishenichnas Adar, Marbim B’Simcha”, which translates as: When the month of Adar arrives we should increase our joy, is often taken at its literal meaning that we should act and be happier during the month of Adar (which begins this Saturday night with the close of Shabbat). This year, of course, is a leap year, and we have two months of Adar – Adar Aleph and Adar Bet, the month we are currently in. On a simple level, increasing ones happiness in this month generally revolves around Purim and celebrating all of its aspects. But let’s look a little deeper, because really, where’s the fun in keeping it simple?

The way I see it, you can teach about tzedakah, chesed and coexistence, or you can just do it. It is Jewish education as the ultimate expression of authentic activity. It is Avraham Avinu running out of his tent, in pain, to see to the three travelling strangers, rather than him sitting in his tent and studying the halachot of tzedakah and hachnasat orchim. I believe the more we are able to fashion a Jewish Education experience that combines studying with doing, learning with practice, then we will be able to make it that much more personal and meaningful to all students in Jewish day schools, be they in yeshiva day schools, or community day schools.

Big class action law suit going on by those claiming that Hebrew National hot dogs are not really kosher, and the Triangle K, which is the kashrut agency giving the hechsher on the hot dogs, who are defending their reputation and the kashrut of the hot dogs.

Growing up, it was always "known" that Hebrew National wasn't really kosher, and you basically accepted that "fact" and chowed down on some other, more kosher hot dog. Now along comes Triangle K, and their spirited defense of their reputation and way of operating. I've read and re-read their statement, and, as a religious Jew, and as a consumer, I find all of this rather perplexing. Even after reading the following JTA article (and it's an excellent one) picked up by Haaretz and other papers, the issues become muddier.

Who do you wind up believing? The halachic issues of shechita(ritual slaughter) are beyond complex (which is why we have kashrut agencies in the first place for matters like this); What level of knowledge are we required to have when making a decision as a kosher consumer? What does all of this do to the trust of the kosher consumer?

Fellow frummies and doysim out there, after reading the statement, and becoming more aware of the issues, are you willing to head on over to your local supermarket, buy a pack of Hebrew National hot dogs, and fire up your spanking new pristine kosher grill in time for the 4th of July?

If you do, what does that say about you?

If you don't, what does that say about you?

Food for thought...

Update - yet another interesting article that provides even more context to this story here.

The Frisco Kid. I mean, does it get any better, or any deeper? Is there really any other movie that fits the mood of the final week of school, when students are gazing longingly out the window at a summer vacation that is around the corner?

Is there any other movie out there that really nails concepts like Shabbos observance, love and honour of Torah, praying for rain and sustenance, and how to mangle curse words in Yiddish?

I saw this movie when I was ten. My father rented a VHS player, borrowed a TV, and that magical winter vacation in Outremont, we watched the two best Jewish films of all time - Blazing Saddles and The Frisco Kid.

Now that I'm a teacher, I really can't justify the educational merits of Blazing Saddles. Too risqué. Too out there. Still has the funniest scene in movie history though...

But the Frisco Kid was another matter entirely. Believe it or not, there are some incredibly meaningful moments in this movie that are worth pausing along the way for a frank discussion with students, with questions like:

Are you actually supposed to give up your life for the sake of a burning Torah?

Can you really park your horse for Shabbos while a posse is on your trail, or do you keep on going?

Do you run to save your friend, or run to extinguish a burning Torah?

A word of caution - there's a mild bit of cursing in the movie. Nothing extreme, but enough to ruffle the sensitivities of your standard teacher in a community day school (Moi...). Warn the students in advance. Grade 5 and up...

Height and Judaism generally don't go hand in hand. While our chain of mesorah and tradition are based on giants of Torah learning who were the leading authorities of their their respective eras, actual giants are not so... Jewish. Goliath yes, David, not so much.

I still remember my first high school basketball team when I was in Jewish Day School. In eighth grade, our starting center could not have been more than 5'6", and a starting guard was like Mini-Me with a kippa (with velcro straps - remember that invention?). As a tribe, we just were not very tall in those days. Nowadays, it's a different story - whatever steroids they're putting into milk these days is working its way up the food chain; kids are huge!

I was reminded about all of this from a recent brilliant blog post by Rav Natan Slifkin of Rationalist Judaism; he writes about the Rabbinic debate over Moshe Rabbeinu's height - is his being "ten cubits high" literal or allegorical? While I don't pretend to be a talmid chacham in the slightest, reading his article jogged my memory of a hysterical YouTube clip I came across years ago on precisely this subject:

When I was a kid in elementary school in Montreal, Tu B'Shvat was a miserable experience. It would usually fall sometime in February, in the middle of a deep and unending freeze. The sun would set at what felt like one o'clock in the afternoon, and you would head home on the city bus in pitch dark, bundled up against the cold. If you were really unlucky, you even wore snow pants. And in the middle of all this winter “wonderland”, you’d be sitting in Ivrit or Judaics class, and your teacher and a volunteer from the parent association would come in with paper bags filled with Tu B'Shvat fruits.

While your teacher would go on and on about draining swamps, chalutzim, and wearing kovah tembels, you would sit there and sample the “best” that Israel had to offer. Which usually meant that you got to eat boxer fruits from the carob tree, and break your teeth in the process. You see, by the time that delicious fruit got picked from the carob tree in Israel, transported by plodding camel and refurbished tractor to some warehouse (where it probably sat for weeks), and then shipped for weeks across the ocean to North America, it was shriveled, black, tasteless, and tooth-chipping hard. In what must have been a nefarious plot by dentists (who incidentally were overwhelmingly represented on the parents association) teeth would chip and shatter all over Jewish Day Schools in Montreal, as boxer after boxer from the Holy Land was chewed and swallowed down with the same perverse pride a fighter must feel for taking a helluva punch. The “pain” of the exile was acutely felt in those moments.

Thank God, things have gotten better for Jewish Day School children experiencing what is the Rosh Hashana of the trees. In addition to transportation methods improving, the holiday itself is experiencing a bit of a renaissance, thanks to Jews rediscovering the mystical elements of the holiday, and the pairing of Tu B'Shvat with a broader understanding of ecology, Israeli geography and environmental sustainability.

I’ll leave you with two teachings on creation and nature…

Rabbi Baruch of Mezibush, a great Chassidic Rebbe, and a grandson of the Ba'al Shem Tov, said:

"God placed sparks of holiness within everything in nature"

And from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Chassidic Rebbe at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the main seminary of Conservative Judaism:

"Human beings must cherish the world, said the Ba'al Shem Tov. To deprecate, to deride it was presumption. Creation, all of creation, was pervaded with dignity and purpose and embodied God’s meaning."

In his column "Open Season on Charedim — and Torah" the writer, Rabbi Avi Shafran, the editor at large and columnist for Ami Magazine, misses a golden opportunity here to get off this cycle of mutual recrimination and find something positive and hopeful to say about Jews of different stripes. Instead, it's more of the same that we keep on seeing these days - attacking anyone perceived to be critical of the Torah world.

Commenting on Rabbi Dov Linzer’s recent column in the New York Times called “Lechery, Immodesty and the Talmud” (which in my circles, flew around Facebook and other social media with a very positive response), Shafran writes:

"Rabbi Dov Linzer’s business, however, is not bigotry but the promotion of a new vision of Judaism, one that many find redolent of the Conservative movement’s early days. The dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in Riverdale in the Bronx, an institution championing 'modern and open Orthodox values'... the opportunity Rabbi Linzer saw was to sully not so much a group of Jews (although he does his share of that too) but rather a concept, that of tznius, or Jewish modesty."

Rabbi Shafran ends his column with the following:

"The emergence of such… interesting writing by Jews in the secular media is, of course, disturbing. (Other adjectives occur as well.) It puts one in mind of what Rashi reminded us recently when we reviewed parshas Shemos, that Moshe Rabbeinu had puzzled over why the Jewish People had languished so long in Egypt—until he discovered the phenomenon of Jews acting contemptibly against other Jews. Then he understood.

If any of us are puzzling over why our current exile is so protracted, well, a glance at some op-ed pages can provide the tragic answer."

Rabbi Shafran is indeed right - we often do act contemptibly against each other, and Rashi was completely accurate in his explanation of the length of our time in slavery. But there's a wider picture here - this didn't end with Mitzrayim. It continued in the desert, with infighting, blaming of the other, pinning it all on the "erev rav". It continues to this very day - Reform. Conservative. Orthodox. Chareidi. Chiloni. Each finding fault with the other, each assigning the blame for our collective problems on the other.

These aren't the other. They are your family. Your brothers and your sisters. Teach your children and your students to find the good in other people, in other Jews who are not exactly like them, teach them to judge people favourably.We may still be in the proverbial desert. But at least while we're together in the desert, we can be there for each other, learn from each other - no matter how much we may disagree on visions of Yiddishkeit and Torah.

Growing up in Montreal, on account of my school's trilingual curriculum, I got used to the creative approaches to teaching multiple languages and subjects, in order to meet Ministry requirements for number of hours of instruction in French. This required my school to integrate its curriculum across three languages... for example, PE was taught in French, Jewish History was taught in Hebrew, Canadian Geography in French, etc. By way of contrast, one of the things I have been struck by in my teaching is how much of a curricular divide often exists between Ivrit class and Judaic's class - one comes across as purely about our language, and the other about our laws and customs... never the twain shall meet. It strikes me as artificial and such a wasted opportunity - Ivrit is the language of our Torah and the modern State of Israel. I teach in a community day school that gives me the freedom to take risks in my teaching (thank God!) and in my Ivrit class, I have been using the dramatic situation in Beit Shemesh between the extreme elements of the Chareidi commnity (the קנאים) and everyone else (חילוני, דתי ציוני) to educate my students about the realities of life in Israel. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

The focal point of this unit in Ivrit is the following clip of one of the leaders of the zealots, Moishele Friedman, who is being interviewed by the mainstream media. What I find absolutely amazing in this short clip is just how much it has to teach us on so many levels, how much it touches on (Jewish history, Israeli politics, the religious-secular divide, extremism, the Shoah, intolerance, modesty and immodesty, the distinction between Medinat Yisrael versus Eretz Yisrael, and so on). It is an extremely rich educational tool that should be mined deeply by both Ivrit teachers and Judaics teachers alike. But first things first - the students had to break into groups, and translate the dialogue line by line into English.

Once they actually understood what was said, this clip left my students amazed and completely befuddled, with a thousand urgent questions, both in Hebrew and English - the ensuing conversation was also in as much Hebrew as the students' ability allowed. Here on the West Coast, my students are really only exposed to a handful of local community Rabbis - apart from the Chabad shluchim here, there is no other Chassideshe community, and no comparable Chareidi community to what you see in the clip. Their experience with the frum world is overwhelmingly positive, and it is not a stretch to say that they believe that if you are a religious person (or even dress the part) then you are therefore "good". Watching this gave new meaning to the term v'nahafoch hu.

"Mar Abba, why would they spit on a little girl?""Aren't they religious, look at how they are dressed?""What's a פרוצה?"Why would they call someone a prostitute? That's so gross!""Mar Abba, she's dressed so modestly, what did she do wrong?""What happened to the lady in the car, why did they smash her car and throw a rock on her leg?""What's a kollel?""Why are they dressing kids in concentration camp outfits? Why do they think Israelis are like Nazis or Communists?"

Welcome to Israel, kids. Welcome to this complex, beautiful Jewish world of ours. Welcome to your family, warts and all. What you are watching is ultimately connected to you in so many different ways.

I made this xtranormal video for my middle school grades. It's a flipped class assignment for their weekly Parshat Hashavuah task, which is teaching the parsha via 2D cartoons on www.toondoo.com. A bit of humour, some creativity, and specific directives - you can get great results this way...

One of the things I noticed when I started teaching in middle school was how a number of schools taught Kabbalat Shabbat, in a manner that in no way resembled the real thing. From personal experience, Friday night and Kabbalat Shabbat is the high point of any davening during the week. You've made it through another week, you get to shul, see old friends, and plug into this wonderful tfillah that is part joy and part exhaustion - in fact, falling asleep during Lcha Dodi is a common occurred for this blogger.

Here's what you will often see in a school. Siddurim come out. A perfunctory Lcha Dodi is sung, maybe a stanza from Shalom Aleichem, students sit in their individual desks, and sliced challah is passed around to suddenly ravenous students, like rice off of the back of a UN supply truck in a war-torn refugee camp. Then it's recess. No feel, no depth to it.

I may be still learning how to be an effective teacher, but I did put in place what I think is a winning formula for how to do Shabbat and Kabbalat Shabbat in a community day school, in as authentic a fashion as possible. So much so that my students will claim that their Kabbalat Shabbat time on Friday is their best part of the week! Remember, characteristics of Authentic Learning Activities are that they have real-world relevance, are collaborative, and value laden (among others).

A note of caution - doing this right takes time, students need to learn the routine. Here's my formula:

Shabbos candles (everyone, boys and girls, light candles and make the bracha) + Shabbos tish (all class tables come together to form one long table, with students facing each other) + Tfillot / Zmirot (the high points of Kabbalat Shabbat, Arvit and Shalom Aleichem, accompanied by niggunim AND vigorous hand drumming) + Kiddush (all students hold their dixie cups the chassideshe way and say kiddush) + washing stations and hamotzi (silence, bracha, and challah is torn and tossed to students) + divrei torah (students share something they learned about the parsha or something they learned in Judaics over the course of the week) + birkat hamazon= Authentic Kabbalat Shabbat Experience, one your students will look forward to every week.

Total time: 40 - 45 minutes, or one full period. For the record, for tfilla, we do Yedid Nefesh, Lchu N'ranenah, Lcha Dodi, VeShamru and then Shalom Aleichem.